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I went to Spring Fever couple years ago, got to meet Wouter. I took the redeye and drove from Atlanta, so I was pretty tired. What I remember may be wrong because of this. Randy Smyth gave a talk about trim. After the talk, one question that came up was about leach telltails. His comment was ...why are you looking back there when going up wind? You will never keep the flow attached back that far, and if you try you will be sheeted out way too far. He uses telltails that are very close to the mast. The one close to the spreaders is the one he uses to adjust prebend.
Randy seems to go very fast

Ken


Thank you, Ken. I was going to say something about Randy Smyth (and Rick White, too) not believing in leech telltales having any value.

But I will leave it to Rick to explain his (and Randy's) position about this. It might be a few days, because Rick is PRO for the Shark Nationals here at Put-in-Bay right now.


I was there when Randy said that and I didn't put leech tales on a main for years later because of that. It's hard to argue with expertise like Smyth and White. However, I did put them on at the mid-point last year because of some European comments I heard and I've found them to be very useful. I have people that comment on copying my downwind trim in light air because we're pretty quick downhill. In my opinion, the right amount of traveler and twist is pretty hard to get correct without more information than just the regular tales can provide. They also provide a reference to how much to sheet in upwind too. It's not that I try to get them to stream straight back all the time, but you want them to stream back about 75% of the time to indicate good flow.

Jake Kohl